The place looks grungier every time I visit. Broken furniture, out-dated computer, recycled drain pipes, beer bottle caps, pallets, busted mirrors. Street art in a town where busted sidewalks and rusted manhole covers turn a longish stroll into a trek.

I sit with a seventeen-year-old from Guinea. He tells me about his first teacher in the village where he was born. The one who had spotted his love of reading and writing and who would stop by his home demanding he write down what he had done that day. About his grandmother who spoke French and contacted his uncle in Conakry when money ran out and there was no way to send him on to further studies. The uncle who took him in so he could attend secondary school. The teacher there – Madame Julienne – who said he must go on to higher studies. Then, his uncle’s death, the road to exile, the crossing  where death by drowning seemed a foregone conclusion, his arrival in Europe and his first experience with the need to beg.

He tells me of his admiration for Sekou Touré whose hopes for a higher education were dashed and yet whose written French was later considered of unparalleled quality. He writes with passion and a mixture of enthusiasm, fatalism and naïveté.  Condemned to success, he says. The ones who make it across are condemned to lying for, at home, no one believes those who tell what life is like really in the great world across the water. He wants to try anyway.

He’s survived the crossing and the first shock of dislocation. Now, Africa shines in his mind like a lost continent of beauty and brotherhood. He’s seventeen years old. I don’t know what will become of him. We’ll meet again next week, and work our way through what he’s written so far.